Summary: Radical acceptance is a distress tolerance skill used in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) to help people acknowledge the reality of situations and/or circumstances they can’t change in order reduce the distress or discomfort caused by those situations and/or circumstances.
Key Points:
- Radical acceptance can help resolve negative reactions to difficult and painful events in our lives.
- Our negative reactions to events in our lives do not change the fact that those events happen.
- Holding on to our negative reactions to events impedes the healing and recovery process.
- Recognizing that some things are beyond our control but happen anyway does not mean we approve of them, it means we recognize we must face them, feel them, and experience them directly in order to heal and move forward.
How Can Radical Acceptance Help Families?
When a family member receives a diagnosis for a mental health disorder, or when you yourself receive a diagnosis for a mental health disorder, it’s often difficult to accept. And the truth is that reaction is common: many of us have a hard time accepting the reality of that we – or a child or parent – have a mental health problem, much less a diagnosis for a clinical mental health disorder.
Rather than accepting the situation and the diagnosis as-is, we may:
- Get angry about it
- Deny it’s true
- Blame others:
- The provider for making the diagnosis
- Our family for events from the past
- Blame and/or judge ourselves for:
- Mistakes we make
- Faults we have
- Our perceived weakness
- Having a mental health problem
When we do all those things, we’re not helping ourselves or our family members. We’re spending our energy on thoughts and behaviors that hold us in place and prevent us from moving forward, because after all our anger, denial, blame, and judgment runs its course, we’re exactly where we were before:
We still have a mental health disorder/diagnosis, or our family member/loved one still has a mental health disorder/diagnosis, and nothing about our reactions changed that fact.
We can apply this to single events in our lives, too. For instance, if a family member does something harmful, we can’t change that, and spending time in denial or anger won’t help us resolve the situation. Or, if we make a big mistake and lose a job, get kicked out of school, or wreck a car, we can’t change that either: what happened, happened. We may feel all kinds of emotions about it, but those emotions don’t change anything except how we feel, temporarily.
Radical acceptance can help families by moving them toward recognizing reality, which is an essential step in any healing process, whether from a mental health disorder, a physical issue, or a difficult, painful event.
What Exactly is Radical Acceptance?
First, we’ll offer a definition of radical acceptance from the website DBT: Dialectical Behavior Therapy, free online resource that helps people learn DBT skills. The offer the following definition of radical acceptance on their resource page “Radical Acceptance”:
“Radical acceptance involves fully acknowledging and embracing the present moment, including its difficulties and discomforts, without trying to change or control it…Radical acceptance means fully accepting our reality, letting go, and realizing that fighting what is does not help or change it, but leads to more distress and discomfort.”
Next, we’ll learn more by going to the source. Radical acceptance is a tool developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan, the psychotherapist who developed dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). In her book DBT Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, Dr. Linehan offers this insight:
“Radical acceptance is what you need to do when you cannot keep painful events and emotions from coming your way.”
In a practical skills worksheet on radical acceptance, Dr. Linehan identifies three core things to understand about radical acceptance:
- Radical means all the way, complete, total.
- It means accepting reality in your mind, heart, and body.
- Radical acceptance occurs when you stop fighting reality, stop your anger at thing not being the way you want them to be, and letting go of bitterness.
She continues, describing what we must accept in order to fully practice radical acceptance:
- Reality as it is right now. We can’t change facts about the present or the past, whether we like them or not.
- Everyone has limitations on what can happen in their future, but the only limitations we need to accept are realistic ones.
- Everything we experience – even events that cause serious pain and suffering – has an identifiable origin and cause.
- Although we may experience problems, difficulties, and painful events, life is worth living.
Dr. Linehan then explains why we need to accept reality in order to heal and move forward with our lives:
- Rejecting reality does not change anything.
- In order to facilitate change, you must first accept what needs to change.
- When we feel pain or emotional distress, that’s nature -i.e. our body, mind, and emotions –telling us “Something is wrong.”
- When we reject reality, we risk changing pain into suffering.
- We may experience this suffering as being stuck in painful, life-interrupting emotions such as bitterness, anger, unhappiness, sadness, and shame.
- When we accept the reality of our situation, it may cause us to feel sad. However, the sadness we feel after radically accepting reality is often followed by a deep sense of calm.
- The only way out of pain is by going through pain. If we refuse to accept the fact that escaping pain involves going through pain, we keep ourselves stuck in the circumstances that cause our pain.
That’s what radical acceptance is, and why we need to embrace the practice of radical acceptance in order to heal and recover from mental health disorders that cause significant distress and disruption. But how do we implement the concept of radical acceptance in our lives?
How to Practice Radical Acceptance
When we ask the question “What is Radical Acceptance?”, what we’re asking, most often, is how we can practice radical acceptance, and apply it to specific situations in our lives. For a simple explanation of how to implement radical acceptance in your life, we encourage you to review the 4-step process on the Radical Acceptance page from the DBT support website we introduce above. Or you can stay here and review the following steps, which we adapted from Dr. Linehan’s DBT Skills Training manual.
Here’s how you do it.
What is Radical Acceptance? Take These Five Steps
- Think of something you’re not fully accepting or something fighting against.
- Pay attention to any physical sensations associated with your resistance.
- Allow emotions such as sadness or disappointment to exist, and pay attention to them the way you pay attention to your physical sensations.
- Remember this fact: not accepting reality does not change reality.
- Think of the causes or origins of the thing you’re having a hard time accepting. This involves:
- A series of events led to what happened, or what’s happening now.
- Remember all events – and our lives – are the result of a preceding series of events.
- Recognize that there is no changing the reality of those preceding events: they unfolded the way they did, and you’re where you are now.
- Tell yourself: “That’s how things happened, and there’s no going back to change how things happened.”
- Work on accepting with your entire being, mind, body, and soul. Tools that can help you accept things completely:
- Affirmations
- Relaxation
- Mindfulness
- Guided imagery
- Accessing spirituality
- Get proactive, and think about, plan, or write down everything you’d do if you radically – completely, totally, one hundred percent – accepted whatever it is you’re resisting accepting. Then, do those things. Even if you haven’t truly accepted the event in question, behave as if you have and do all the behaviors on your list the way you’d do them if you had radically accepted the thing you’re resisting.
Once you’ve gone through this process, it’s important to remember that despite the discomfort, painful emotions, or distress you may have experienced, life is still worth living, and you can live a full and fulfilling life on your own terms – once you accept reality and develop the skills to manage your emotional reactions to unwanted, undesirable, or unpleasant circumstances.
When to Practice Radical Acceptance
The mental health resource website VeryWellMind has an excellent page on radical acceptance here. The authors address something about radical acceptance that may be misunderstood: radical acceptance doesn’t mean you have to accept literally everything that happens simply because it happened.
We’ll explain.
Engaging in radical acceptance is helpful:
- During or immediately after traumatic events
- When you’re in denial about your emotions
- When you feel stuck in a pattern of negativity associated with a specific thing
- After the death of a loved one, while feeling loss and grief
- When working through a romantic, partner, or friendship break-up
- During times of serious change: school graduations, job loss, new job, or sudden, unexpected ife events
Engaging in radical acceptance is not helpful:
- When you’re in an abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationship. No one has to accept neglect, abuse, or maltreatment of any kind, ever.
- When someone is harassing you, taking advantage of you, or treating you unfairly at work. No power dynamic –including boss/worker – excuses harassment or unfair treatment.
- When family members consistently ignore your boundaries or reasonable requests. Being a family member does not give a person license to ignore your basic needs, wants, dignity, or essential rights.
- When you don’t feel like addressing something. Radical acceptance is not cover for complacency in emotional work, relationships, or mental heath treatment.
The goal of radical acceptance is to empower you to regain control of your reactions to circumstances so that they don’t cause you ongoing pain and suffering. In other words, we use it not to allow others to do whatever they like, but rather to manage our reactions to the events in our lives and reduce the amount of emotional pain and distress we feel.
Radical Acceptance in Your Present, Future, and Past
We’ll clarify that radical acceptance allows you to transcend your judgment and negative emotions around an event or set of circumstances, but does not diminish, negate, or minimize the magnitude of the event(s).
It’s a tool to use while facing a difficulty that’s hard to overcome or you resist accepting.
Radical acceptance works well for things in the here and now and things in the past. But, amazingly, it also things in the future. You can use a skill Dr. Linehan calls cope ahead:
“Imagine (in your mind’s eye) believing what you don’t want to accept. Rehearse in your mind what you would do if you accepted what seems unacceptable.”
That’s one thing that makes radical acceptance a worthwhile skill: you can apply it in a variety of circumstances to move from an emotional place you don’t want to be to a place you do want to be. And if you cope ahead, you can use it to avoid ending up where you don’t want to be in the first place.
We’ll close this article with another skill associated with radical acceptance: coping statements. Coping statements help you clarify, in simple and direct language, everything we’ve discussed in this article, and enable you to apply radical acceptance where and when you need it. Here are examples of coping statements we adapted from the resources we cite throughout this article. If you’re stuck trying to accept something in your life, use these statements as guides you can adapt to your immediate circumstances to help you get unstuck.
Coping Statements: Radical Acceptance in Daily Life
- The only moment I have control over is the present moment.
- I can’t change what already happened.
- If I fight negative emotions, they get stronger.
- I can accept this moment exactly as it is, right now.
- I accept how I’m feeling right now.
- This is hard and I can handle it.
- Even though I don’t like the way I feel right now, I know I’ll get through it to the other side.
- I can feel sadness and anxiety but still manage this moment in a healthy and effective manner.
- I can accept negative events from my past and still find happiness in the present and hope for the future.
- It’s okay to feel the way I feel: I’ve been through this before, and I made it – and I can make it through this, too.
